No. 3305

Francillon Cakes

Gateaux Francillon

These are prepared with one pound of peeled sweet almonds, fourteen ounces of clarified butter kneaded with twenty ounces of vanilla sugar (No. 3165), also four and a half ounces of flour, two ounces of fecula, ten or twelve egg-yolks, seven or eight beaten whites, and a grain of salt. Pound the almonds with one egg-white, dilute with a glassful of good milk, and pass through a sieve; put the butter into a vessel, and with a spoon beat in the eggs, one at a time. When the whole is creamy mix in the sugar, the almonds, the beaten whites, and the sifted flour and fecula. Line a thin raised-edge baking sheet with sweet paste (No. 136), pour in the preparation, smooth nicely and bake in a slack oven; when unmolded and cold brush apricot marmalade (No. 3675) over the top, and cut it into small cakes without separating the pieces; ice the surface with kirsch icing (No. 102), and detach from each other only when this becomes dry, then dress.

← No. 3304 Eclairs, Vanilla Chantilly Small Cakes for Entremets No. 3306 Galettes Puffed and half Puffed →

For the Modern Kitchen

A large almond-butter sheet cake, glazed and cut into petits fours. Ranhofer assumes a professional pastry kitchen, so the quantities are big and several components are cross-referenced to other numbers in the book.

FeculaRanhofer's fécule is potato starch. Cornstarch behaves similarly here; the two ounces exist to lighten the crumb against all that almond and butter.
Vanilla sugarNo. 3165 is sugar scented with vanilla beans and sifted. Twenty ounces of granulated sugar rubbed with the seeds of two beans, or with a tablespoon of vanilla extract added to the batter, gets you to the same place.
A slack ovenThe book gives no temperatures, and a slack oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 300 to 325F. This is a rich, sugar-heavy batter in a shallow sheet; anything hotter risks setting the edges and colouring the sweet-paste lining before the centre is done. Bake by eye rather than to a fixed time.
Pounding the almondsA pound of blanched almonds with one egg white and a glassful of milk (an imprecise measure, somewhere between a half cup and a cup), worked to a paste and sieved, is a food processor job now. Run it long enough that no grit remains, or the sieve step becomes a chore.
Clarified butterFourteen ounces of clarified butter is not the same as fourteen ounces of whole butter — clarifying removes water and milk solids, so start with about seventeen or eighteen ounces. It must be soft and opaque, not melted, or it will not cream with the yolks.
Egg countsTen or twelve yolks and seven or eight whites, in period sizes, come to roughly 7 oz of yolk and 8 oz of white. Weigh rather than count if you want consistency. The whites go in beaten, ahead of the sifted flour and fecula.
Sweet paste liningNo. 136 is a pâte sucrée. Line the sheet, dock it, and chill it firm before pouring in the batter; an unchilled crust slumps under this weight.
Apricot marmaladeStrained apricot jam boiled briefly to a brushable glaze. Its job is to seal the crumb so the icing sits on the surface instead of soaking in — do not skip it.
Cut, then iceThe hinge of the method. Score the cakes through while the slab is intact, ice the whole surface with kirsch fondant, and separate only after the icing has crusted. Doing it in the other order gives ragged, smeared edges.
YieldThis fills a half-sheet pan generously and will give several dozen petits fours, the number depending entirely on how small you cut them. Halve the recipe for a domestic kitchen.

A Little History

Francillon was a play by Alexandre Dumas fils, first staged in Paris in 1887, and its name attached itself to more than one dish in the years that followed — the best known is the warm potato and mussel salad, generally traced to a scene in which a character describes it in detail. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, worked in exactly the register where a fashionable Parisian title could be pinned to a new pastry, and these gateaux belong to the vast section of small iced cakes served with the entremets course. The construction — a rich almond slab baked on a sweet-paste base, apricot-glazed, fondant-iced and cut into squares — is the standard petit four glacé method of the late nineteenth century, and it survives essentially unchanged in French pastry work today.